Classifying Mages

It’s been mentioned that trying to classify mages is difficult or impossible. But it’s also been mentioned that people have tried and they have created various systems for doing this. The reason is pretty straightforward. Even if these systems are intrinsically imperfect, they’re informative, and having language for easily describing someone is useful. The motivation for systems both informal and rigorous is easy to see. Theories about why they work the way they do are often very complex, and are largely beyond the scope of this note, a phrase you should get ready to see a lot.
Despite ignoring the underlying theory and the reason things take some of these forms, this is going to be a long note. It’s not important to fully understand the back-end reasoning in order to understand the story. In case you want to know the categories that are mentioned throughout the narrative but not to read the full essay, I’ll go ahead and list those up front. The main categorization system, aside from just going “that mage works with this specialty”, has five categories: Wizard, sorcerer, druid, shaman, witch. Wizards and sorcerers both work with physical forces; wizards do so using rational logic, while sorcerers work with emotion and intuition. Druids interact with the physical world, and shamans interact with the spirit world. Witches interact with living things.

Knowing this set of terms is enough to get by in the narrative itself without losing anything. The rest of this essay is just for people who are interested in the back-end reasoning I use for this, which (as usual) is much more elaborate and abstract than it first seems.…

Teleportation

Teleportation is almost impossible. For the vast majority of people, human and otherwise, it is completely out of reach, impossible; it is among the most complex and difficult types of working there is, in this setting. The reason for this goes back to something that was mentioned in the Magical Mechanics note: Location is among the most fundamental and difficult-to-change parts of the world. Any time you want to screw with spatial dimensions and the concept of position, things get difficult fast.

Now, to start, let’s define teleportation. What people in-setting mean by this is that someone is in one spatial location, and is then in a different spatial location, without having moved and without having engaged with the space in between.…

Chapter Three

The laceration in my shoulder was, as I’d expected, fairly minor. It was noticeable, sure, but it wasn’t a serious impairment. And while I didn’t heal as quickly as a werewolf, I was still significantly better than human baseline. I was guessing it would only be a few days before it was completely healed, at most. I didn’t even bother bandaging it, just washed it in the shower and put a clean shirt over it. Infection wasn’t a huge risk for me. Like poisons, infectious diseases seemed to have little effect on me for some reason. I did not get colds, hadn’t had one since I was a teenager.

It took time, though, and energy. By the time I was done, I was feeling tired. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep yet, though, and ended up at my computer instead. Raincloud came and curled around my feet almost immediately, and she was absolutely capable of sleeping. I could feel her dreams flickering in the back of my head, half-formed presences much more pleasant than mine usually were. Even the tree spirit cohabiting with her seemed to be asleep, or something like it. I wasn’t entirely clear on how that worked, but he did seem to go dormant most of the time when she was asleep, and that was definitely the case now.

I spent a while working on a logo design I’d agreed to do for some Australian guy who owned a ranching supply store. He’d had a hard time finding someone to do that work, and now that I was halfway through the project, I could understand why. I wasn’t making much progress, but I was too worked up to sleep still, and too distracted and tired to do much of anything well. It was something to do with my hands while I calmed myself down more than anything.…

Sword Design

The bronze sword that Thorn is being compared to is called a kopis and is a traditional form of ancient Greek sword. It’s curved forward and shaped somewhat like a larger version of a kukri. It’s more sharply curved than Thorn and has a convex tip, for a number of reasons; this makes it less suitable for thrusting. Thorn is more similar in profile to some of the thinner forms of the Illyrian sica, which has a longer, thinner, and less sharply curved blade. Unlike a normal sica (or a kopis, or a khopesh, or a falcata, or a kukri, or…you get the point), Thorn is sharpened on both edges. There are a number of reasons for this, mostly related to how much more you can get away with as a swordsmith when the material you’re working with will be made supernaturally durable. Mundane blacksmiths have to manage an inherent property of steel, which is that harder (i.e., able to take and retain a sharper edge) alloys will also be less tough (i.e., they will be brittle and prone to shatter).…

Chapter Two

Maddie didn’t take us all the way home, and I didn’t ask her to. She had offered to drive because she was making the trip anyway. She lived pretty close to the Blackbird Cabaret, in the same largely-abandoned post-industrial ghost town of a neighborhood. I was pretty sure she was there for similar reasons, too; it was quiet, and defensible, and there were no neighbors to cause a fuss. She had a meeting in the middle of the night tonight at Mark’s, the bar that was one of the other major local social spaces for our crowd.

So, she drove us there and then dropped us off outside the bar. Her need to be early for that appointment was obsessive enough that trying to get her to take us the rest of the way would have been a waste of effort. And it was only a few blocks from Mark’s to my house, anyway. Comfortable walking distance, and both Raincloud and I could handle the cold just fine.…

Chapter One

Attending a show at the Blackbird Cabaret was always a fascinating experience.

The building itself contributed a lot to that. Capinera actively refused to add permanent furniture, so you either stood, or you brought a chair or blanket to sit on if there was room at the event in question. The ceiling was open to show ducting and rafters from when the building was a warehouse, and the floor was open concrete except for a single, simple stage. The overall impression was an odd, surreal minimalism. It lent the Blackbird a sort of raw feeling, unfiltered and without any pretense.

Then you had the audience, which was its own kind of bizarre. Capinera didn’t exactly bar normal humans from it (though some of the individual performers did), but the crowd was always mostly or entirely drawn from the supernatural community. That never made up a large portion of the total population, but Pittsburgh had enough people to still maintain a decent crowd of us, and the Blackbird had enough of a reputation by now to draw people from further afield as well. I’d seen a lot of very strange people there, many of whom were barely even pretending to be mortals.

And, finally, there was the performance itself. Capinera was easily the most gifted a capella vocalist I’d ever heard, and those nights were so intense in their sound and emotion that I could barely tolerate being in the room for them. But most nights, she wasn’t performing herself, just providing the space for someone else. Those performers could be very, very strange, and unfortunately their quality was…not often on par with hers.…